Never Fear

With the polio epidemic striking terror in the hearts of millions—in 1949, it caused more than 2,700 deaths in the U.S. alone—Ida Lupino made this semiautobiographical melodrama about a dancer-choreographer (Sally Forrest) who struggles to overcome the disease that has crippled her body and her confidence. The film’s unusually hard-eyed realism was born of Lupino’s own dark memories of polio as an aspiring teenage actress, as well as her use of documentary locations and nonprofessional actors—most tenderly in the famous wheelchair square dance filmed (by veteran John Ford cinematographer Archie Stout) with actual rehab patients at the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica.

Starring Sally Forrest, Keefe Brasselle, Hugh O'Brian